by Guy Claxton
This increasing tendency to look for authority not outwards, to the received traditions and mythologies of Church or state, but inwards, to one’s own mental workings, was accompanied by the shrinkage of ‘mind’ to admit only conscious reason, and to deny the legitimacy or even the very existence, of aspects of the mind that were not open to introspection. One came to conclusions, one knew, by working things out for oneself, and the way one did that was by conscious, deliberate thinking. That was the only kind of ‘thinking’, the only cognitive activity, there was. This outrageous, but as it turned out compelling, claim is usually attributed to René Descartes who, as Jacques Maritain puts it, ‘with his clear ideas divorced intelligence from mystery’; though in truth Descartes’ contribution was to encapsulate and give powerful expression to an intellectual movement that already possessed considerable momentum. Descartes wrote to his friend Mersennes: ‘nothing can be in me, that is, in my mind, of which I am not conscious; I have proved it in the Meditations’, and his insistence that the intelligent unconscious simply did not exist carried such conviction that it seeped into the culture at large, and became ‘common sense’. All intelligence is conscious, and conscious intelligence – reason – is who, essentially, I am.
By 1690, John Locke was simply stating the obvious when he said that ‘It is altogether as intelligible to say that a body is extended without parts, as that anything thinks without being conscious of it.’ And in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding he neatly encapsulates what was fast becoming psychological orthodoxy:
[A person] is a thinking, intelligent being, that has reason and reflection, and can consider itself as itself, the same thinking thing, in different times and places, which it does only by that consciousness which is inseparable from thinking, and, as it seems to me, essential to it . . . Consciousness always accompanies thinking, and it is that which makes every one to be what he calls self.
The assumption that conscious reason was the core of human identity, and the highest achievement of mental evolution, fed the growth of empirical science and the plethora of technological miracles to which it gave rise. From technology, it was a short step to the effective cultural takeover which we see today, and which Neil Postman, as we have seen, refers to as ‘technopoly’: a world in which every adverse or inconvenient circumstance is construed as a technological problem to be fixed through purposeful, rational analysis and invention.5 In such a world, cognition becomes synonymous with this kind of busy, intentional mental activity – d-mode – and the very idea of ‘letting things come’, of waiting, becomes paradoxical or ridiculous. Thinking is the conscious manipulation of information and ideas preferably (now) with the aid of spreadsheets and graphics; and if solutions do not come, that simply means you are not thinking hard or clearly enough, or you need better data. Just as the invention of the printing press created ‘prose’, but by the same token made poetry appear exotic and élitist, and the balladeers redundant, so the hegemony of modern information technology has vastly increased the speed and complexity of data-handling, while making rumination and contemplation look hopelessly inefficient and old-fashioned.
Tools are not ideologically or psychologically neutral. Their very existence channels the development of intelligence (as well as a host of other facets of culture, such as vocational prestige), opening up and encouraging certain cognitive avenues, and simultaneously closing down and devaluing others. We are fashioned by our tools, and none more so than the computer. For ‘the computer redefines people as “information processors” and nature itself as information to be processed. The fundamental metaphorical message of the computer, in short, is that we are machines – thinking machines, to be sure, but machines nonetheless.’6 Computers epitomise the definition of ‘intelligence’ as fast, explicit and clear-cut, based on objective data and under tight control.
The computer makes possible the fulfilment of Descartes’ dream of the mathematization of the world. Computers make it easy to convert facts into statistics and problems into equations. And whereas this can be useful . . . it is diversionary and dangerous when applied indiscriminately to human affairs. So is the computer’s emphasis on speed and especially its capacity to generate and store unprecedented quantities of information. In specialised contexts, the value of calculation, speed and voluminous information may go uncontested. But the ‘message’ of computer technology is comprehensive and domineering. The computer argues, to put it baldly, that the most serious problems confronting us at both personal and public levels require technical solutions through fast access to information otherwise unavailable.7
This implication is both false and pernicious. Our most serious problems are not technical, nor do they arise from inadequate information. If a war breaks out, or a family falls apart, it is not (usually) because of inadequate information. Yet to speak up for the virtues of mental sloth, for thinking that is elliptical and allusive, where even the goals may not be clearly known, is to be an information technology heretic. As they say in the trade, ‘it does not compute’. Computers know nothing of the value of confusion, or the virtues of torpor. Their quality is assessed in terms of the size of their memory and the speed of their processor.
It is not the computer that is at fault so much as the computational frame of mind. Martin Heidegger, in his famous speech commemorating the birth of the German composer Conradin Kreutzer in 1955, drew a distinction between ‘calculative’ and ‘meditative’ thinking, and expounded powerfully the risks of leaning exclusively on the former.8
Man today will say – and quite rightly – that there were at no time such far-reaching plans, so many inquiries in so many areas, [so much] research carried on as passionately as today. Of course. And this display of ingenuity and deliberation has its own great usefulness. Such thought remains indispensable. But – it also remains true that it is thinking of a special kind. Its peculiarity consists in the fact that whenever we plan, research and organize, we always . . . take [conditions] into account with the calculated intention of their serving specific purposes . . . Such thinking remains calculation even if it neither works with numbers nor uses an adding machine or computer.
Man finds himself in a perilous position . . . A far greater danger threatens [than the outbreak of a third world war]: the approaching tide of technological revolution in the atomic age could so captivate, bewitch, dazzle and beguile man that calculative thinking may someday come to be accepted and practised as the only way of thinking. What great danger then might move upon us? Then there might go hand in hand with the greatest ingenuity in calculative planning and inventing, indifference toward ‘meditative’ thinking, total thoughtlessness. And then? Then man would have denied and thrown away his own special nature – that he is a meditative being. Therefore the issue is the saving of man’s essential nature. Therefore the issue is keeping meditative thinking alive. (Emphasis added)
The mind itself comes to be evaluated in calculative terms. Despite the tentative introduction of project and course work, students continue to be largely assessed, at school, college and university, on their ability to manipulate data under pressure of time. The so-called GMAT, the Graduate Management Admission Test, which is almost universally used in the States, and increasingly elsewhere, to select graduates for admission to management and business schools, consists of nine sections, seven of which contain a sequence of multiple-choice questions that is too long to be completed in the carefully stipulated time. The questions are designed to test ‘basic mathematical skills and understanding of elementary concepts, the ability to reason quantitatively, solve quantitative problems, and interpret graphic data; the ability to understand and evaluate what is read; and the ability to think critically and communicate complex ideas through writing’.9
There is no reason to believe that these skills are anything other than useful or even vital for the manager of the future; but the implicit assumption that they cover all the important abilities seems, in the light of the research which I have been describ
ing, staggeringly myopic. On the contrary, the ability to be innovative, or to detect the meaning in a snippet of information (the beginning of a consumer trend, for example) – abilities which companies frequently claim are in desperately short supply – requires expertise in slow and hazy, rather than fast and clear, ways of knowing. The GMAT seems designed to discard right from the start people with contemplative or aesthetic dispositions. Those with the potential and the inclination to become virtuoso ruminators need not apply. In general, all such tests of ‘general ability’, or ‘intelligence’ in the narrow sense, favour those who are able to think (a) fast, (b) under pressure, (c) on their own, about (d) abstract, impersonal problems, which are (e) clearly defined, have (f) a single ‘right’ answer, and have (g) been formulated by unknown other people.10 Sometimes this ability is just what a practical situation demands. Many predicaments need something quite different. It is not surprising that tests of IQ correlate so poorly with measures of real-life, on-the-job performance. (As we saw in Chapter 2 the reasoning of professional horse-racing handicappers is based on a highly sophisticated (but largely unarticulated) mental model that includes up to seven independent variables – yet their individual levels of performance are completely unrelated to their IQs.11)
In the business world particularly, the idea that the quality of thought depends on the amount and up-to-dateness of such information has completely taken over. It is all but impossible to resist the prevailing idea that all thinking worth its salt involves the deliberate manipulation of data – which boils down to ‘facts and figures’. Everything is purposeful, explicit, calculated and well informed. Tom Peters, one of the most revered of management gurus, quotes, with apparent approval, the following.
Gentry magazine, June-July 1994. A multipage advertisement for Silicon Valley realtor Alain Pinel includes, yes, each agent’s Internet address. For example, you can reach Mary S. Gullixson at [email protected]. One friend, who works for the firm, tells me she arrives at work each morning to about 100 e-mail messages!12
When Harriet Donnelly is on a business trip, she religiously carts along her NCR Safari 3170 notebook computer, her SkyWord alphanumeric pager and her AT&T cellular phone. She told Fortune magazine . . . that after a day of meetings: ‘The first thing I do when I get back to my hotel is . . . return any messages I can, using voice mail. Next I plug my computer into the telephone and download [my] e-mail . . . I also get messages on my pager.’13
One morning I stood on a wobbling dock [in Bangkok] waiting for a sooty old commuter ‘express’ boat to arrive. Next to me was a crisply starched Thai businessman . . . As he skilfully shifted his weight to keep his balance, he placed a string of calls on his portable cellular phone, talking excitedly. Wherever I went, I saw that kind of hustle, that kind of entrepreneurship, that kind of fervour . . . Frankly, it felt as if America had opted out of any effort to compete.14
If even Mary Gullixson and Harriet Donnelly – whose habits have rapidly become the business norm – aren’t ‘competing’, it is clearly because American business is not quite ‘up with the play’ in terms of speed and information. The possibility that work depends on ideas, that ideas differ in their quality, as well as their up-to-dateness, and that quality takes time to mature, seems to be almost universally dismissed.
There are grumblings in the business world about the perils of rampant d-mode, though no one yet seems to see how deeply the problem runs. Roy Rowan, in his book The Intuitive Manager, talks about a business type which he calls ‘the articulate incompetent’: full of good ideas, immaculately presented, which lack substance and don’t work. The verbal fluency of the articulate incompetents makes them persuasive; they are clever enough to be able to make an impressive-sounding case for whatever they have come up with. They tend to build an imposing superstructure of justification on a minimal foundation of observation. (And they may be so committed to being ‘right’ that they refuse to give their position up, even when it becomes apparent that there are considerations which they have not taken into account.) Rowan quotes interviews with some CEOs who tend to blame the phenomenon of articulate incompetence on schools. The inadequacy of the GMAT, and the ‘education’ that builds upon it, are noted by Robert Bernstein, chairman of giant publishers Random House, for example. Bernstein says: ‘That’s what frightens me about business schools. They train their students to sound wonderful. But it’s necessary to find out if there’s judgement behind their language.’15
Alternatively, there is a negative type, the ‘articulate sceptic’, whose cleverness manifests itself as a reflex need to show how bright he is by criticising whatever anyone else has proposed. As Edward de Bono has pointed out: ‘The critical use of intelligence is always more immediately satisfying than the constructive use. To prove someone else wrong gives you instant achievement and superiority. To agree makes you seem superfluous and a sycophant. To put forward an idea puts you at the mercy of those on whom you depend for evaluation of the idea.’16 It may be safer, for the essentially evaluative d-moder, to be seen to be reactive rather than proactive – to respond to a presented problem, rather than to take a fresh look at a situation and reconceptualise what the problems are. Being generative, which is creative and intuitive, is bound to be riskier than being evaluative.
The need for creative responsiveness to changing conditions is now widely recognised in the pressurised cabins of business boardrooms. Grand strategic plans are fine in a stable world but, as Rowan says, talking of the senior manager: ‘the farther into an unpredictable future his decisions reach . . . the more he must rely on intuition.’17 As we have seen, it is not that in uncertain conditions we have to ‘make do’ with intuition, as if we were clutching at straws. It is that well-developed, tentatively used intuition is actually the best tool for the job; while the apparent solidarity of a rational, strategic plan offers nothing more than a comforting illusion. Henry Mintzberg, professor of management at McGill University in Canada, in his classic The Rise and Fall of Strategic Planning, demonstrates once and for all the insufficiency of d-mode as a way of knowing for the business world.18 ‘A good deal of corporate planning . . . is like a ritual rain-dance. It has no effect on the weather that follows, but those who engage in it think it does . . . Moreover, much of the advice related to corporate planning is directed at improving the dancing, not the weather.’19
Not only does inflexible attachment to a plan (which it has taken a lot of time, effort and money to create) make a company unresponsive; such plans, Mintzberg shows, tend to be based on only those considerations that can be clearly articulated and – preferably – quantified: ‘hard data’. They therefore fail to take into account precisely that ‘marginal’ information – impressions, details, hunches, ‘telling incidents’ and so on – which provide the vital ‘straws in the wind’ on which prescient decisions can be based – and on which intuition thrives. Because consciousness demands information that is tidy and unequivocal, it can never be as richly informed as intuition. If you wait until a market trend is clear, you will have lost the edge. In business, as elsewhere, when decisions depend on the use of faint clues in intricate situations, the tortoise outstrips the hare.
But the calibre of intuition varies enormously. If intuition is merely a panicky, impulsive reaction to the failures of d-mode, it will be unreliable. In a world where TQM stands, more often than not, for ‘Terrible Quality of Mind’, intuition needs cultivating and nurturing. To be positive, we need to give some attention to specifying those conditions which facilitate the production of top-quality intuitions. The first requirement is a climate in which the value of intuitions, and the nature of the mental modes that produce them, are clearly understood by all. The second is leadership which models and acknowledges the value of intuition: managers who ‘walk their talk’ as far as slow knowing is concerned, encouraging the contribution of ideas that are judged on their merits, and not on how slickly or persuasively they are initially put across. Business leaders need to be open to ‘the
germ of an idea’ that may seem unconventional at first sight, or which may be expressed in terms of analogies or images.
De Bono, in his many books on ‘lateral thinking’, has provided a wealth of telling illustrations of ideas that look ‘silly’ or ‘childish’ to start with, but which turn out on closer inspection to contain the seeds of highly creative and appropriate solutions.20 A child drew a wheelbarrow that had the wheel at the back, near the handles, and the legs at the front. This ‘silly mistake’, which could easily have been ‘corrected’ by a conventional teacher, in fact produces a barrow that is ideal for manoeuvring round tight corners (on the same principle as a dumper truck that has the steering wheels at the back).
An apocryphal firm that sold mail-order glassware was suffering an unacceptably high level of breakages in transit, and they could not find a way to construct or label their parcels which made any difference. However much padding they put in, the glass was still getting broken. Then someone suggested that they simply stick the address label on the glass, and send it completely unprotected. Though this was rejected as being too risky, the idea behind it – that if the postal handlers could clearly see that the goods were fragile, rather than being told so by stickers which they tended to ignore, they might naturally take more care – was a good one, and it led, via a second creative leap, to the design of packaging that had a glassy finish, which had the desired effect.
